Jury Awards Abused McDonald’s Employee $6.1 Million
A Shepherdsville jury has awarded $6.1 million to a former McDonald’s employee, Louise Ogborn, who sued the company and the store’s assistant managers for being strip-searched, humiliated, and sodomized.
This case began from a call made from a man who impersonated a police officer, and convincing assistant manager, Donna Summers, that Ogborn had stolen money from a customer. The mysterious caller asked Summers to strip-search Ogborn. As the situation proceeded, a middle-aged man, Walter Nix Jr., came to the store to watch the search while continuing to the phone call with the mysterious caller.
When Nix took over the phone call, he continued to listen to the caller’s instructions, and Ogborn was further humiliated by having to jog in place with her hands in the air, do jumping jacks, stand on a chair. Nix also spanked Ogborn several times, and eventually ordered her to perform oral sex on him.
The abuse finally stopped when a maintance worker at the store took over the phone and refused to follow the caller’s instructions.
This whole incident was fully recorded on the security camera on the room.
The mysterious caller turned out to be David Stewart, a Florida correctional officer. He was charged with making the phone call. According to Ogborn’s lawyer, Stewart had been making this calls for 10 years, and some 70 stores in more than 30 states had led to criminal charges for more than one set of unwitting employees.
Mt. Washington police Detective Buddy Stump said, "[Stewart] was just a slick con man. He’d end up talking the manager into doing a strip search on the employee. His conversations generally lasted for quite some time — an hour-and-a-half to three hours." Stump found the evidence against Stewart after he traced a phone card used in the call to a store in Florida. An investigator there found surveillance video of a man they thought was Stewart buying the card, wearing a corrections uniform, and Stump flew down to assist in the arrest.
Stewart was charged with impersonating an officer, soliciting a sexual act and soliciting sexual abuse, but eventually became the only person charged in the incident to be acquitted.
Stewart’s defense attorney Steve Romines, at first insisted that it was unknown if the man shown on tape buying the calling card in question was actually Stewart. Then, when investigators claimed to find a calling card at Stewart’s home used in another of the hoax calls, Romines argued that having the card didn’t mean Stewart actually made the call. In the end, Romines convinced the jury that the evidence which did not include any witnesses or a recording of the caller’s voice was insufficient to convict Stewart.
Even after the acquittal, prosecutor Mike Mann continued to insist Stewart made the call. Meanwhile, Nix was later convicted of sex abuse, sexual misconduct and unlawful imprisonment and sentenced to five years after pleading guilty in the case.
The jury also found that McDonald’s was 50 percent at fault in the case, as was the caller, which will affect the amount apportioned. Ogborn claimed that McDonald’s did not sufficiently warn its employees of the ongoing hoax calls. McDonald’s attorneys claimed that the company had, but managers at the Mt. Washington store failed to relay the information.
Despite being sued by Ogborn, Summers also sued McDonald’s concurrently with Ogborn for $50 million. For the claim by Ogborn, the jury found that Summers and the other manager were not liable. On the other hand, the jury awarded $1.1 million to Summers from her claim agains’t McDonald’s, Summer said she’d use her settlement to take care of her family.
After the trial, Ogborn said she felt closure, and intends to go to law school. Her settlement includes $5 million in punitive and $1.1 million in compensatory damages.
Source:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21151994/
This case really shows that don’t trust people too easily…., and it might not sound to be anything fun if it happen to you, BUT $6.1 million reward is pretty SWEET, isn’t it?
